Eight months on, Thea was still a little salty about just how effectively the others had kept her and Rebecca in the dark when I’d been missing, even though Xander had come clean about everything once the danger was past—about Emily, about Eve, about all of it.
There was no danger in knowing the truth now.
“Also,” Thea continued with the air of an oracle getting ready to issue her finest prediction, “that baby is going to spit up all over that gown, Avery.”
I had to admit that holding a baby while trying on wedding gowns was rather like playing Hawthorne Russian Roulette.
“Actually,” Max chimed in, “smart money says that babypalindromesall over it instead.”
“Dare I ask?” Zara said. Between Oren’s near-death experience at Vantage, their subsequent romance, and the birth of Nash and Libby’s twins, Zara, for the first time since I’d known her, seemed to no longer be fighting battles of any sort with herself. It also didn’t hurt that I’d already asked her to join me, join us in what we were doing.
“Starts with ap, ends with ap,” Libby told Zara with one of thosethe-things-I-have-seen-since-becoming-a-parentsmiles of hers. “You fill in the rest.”
I stroked the baby’s silky-soft cheek. “You would never.” I smiled and looked up at myotherniece, who was currently gnawing on the end of Rebecca’s hair like the family honor depended on her ability to gum it into submission. “Your sister, on the other hand,” I said, “is plotting how she can do it from all the way over there.”
The twins had arrived in the world a little more than three months earlier, on April first. Everyone except Nash had thought Libby was playing a trick on us when she went into labor, but Nash had just kissed my sister long and hard and then brought her straight to the hospital, where their daughters had been delivered less than an hour later. Identical from head to toe, one had the temperament of a sage and the other… took after her uncle Jameson.
If it was possible for a three-month-old to be fearless, that was Faith. She had the fiercer temper and the bigger smile. In contrast, even at three months old, Seren gave the impression of missing nothing.
Rebecca removed her hair from Faith’s mouth. “Don’t listen to them,” she told the baby. “Everyone knows it’s the quiet ones you really have to watch out for.”
Faith—named by her father—yowled, then gurgled in agreement.
Seren—a Welsh name that Libby had picked for its closeness toSarah, the name by which she’d known my mother—blinked owlishly up at me. I was pretty sure the only reason Libby hadn’t named one of her daughtersHannahwas that she was reserving that name for me.
“It’s always the quiet ones,” Thea agreed, staring at Rebecca holding that baby, a very un-Thea-like softness in her eyes.
Libby smiled and divested me of the quiet, snuggly baby in my arms. “Come to Mama, Seren, before Auntie Alisa gives Auntie Avery theplease-don’t-cause-an-international-incident-over-your-wedding-gownspeech. Again.”
“Avery can cause all the international incidents she wants,” Alisa replied, “if she’ll just choose a gown.”
I had no real interest in planning the wedding of the century, but as far as the press was concerned, I was still Cinderella, and the one thing the world loved more than a Cinderella story was a fairy-tale ending.
Even if my story, in reality, was a very different sort of fairy tale.
“I’m only trying on one more tonight,” I announced to the room at large. “The carnival awaits.”
Fourth of July at Hawthorne House had always been one of a kind.
“Try the one on the end of rack number five,” Libby advised me. “It came postmarked from London.”
From Zella, I translated. The Proprietor of the Devil’s Mercy and I had stayed in touch. I didn’t give her orders. I didn’t give anyone orders. But Zella knew quite well what I’d been working on, what Jameson and I had both been working on for almost eight months.
I hadn’t told anyone yet that we’d finally cracked it.
I have a secret, I thought,about a web that stretches across history, across continents.
I have a secret about a new day dawning.
The dress that Zella had sent was a simple one, no lace, no beadwork, no straps. It was floor-length butmoved.
In Rebecca’s arms, Faith somehow contorted to reach forLyra’s hair, tangling a wad of it in her first.
“I think she wants Cooper,” Libby opined.
“Cooper does like to be adored,” Lyra told Faith, gently freeing her hair, “but you’re going to have to pull him away from the catapult. No easy task.”
“The catapult?” Alisa repeated, her eyes narrowing.
